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Helping Parents Help Their Children to Discover Nature
I was on a trail run last week up to Sacagawea Peak, a popular hiking destination in the northern Bridger Range. I stopped to admire a herd of mountain goats when I encountered a young family on the trail. The boy, perhaps age 9, was just bubbling with excitement. His pockets were bulging and his hands were full of prized rock samples. He had found a treasure trove of fossils. I introduced myself as a geologist and asked if I could see his samples. We sorted through his treasures, and I helped identify brachiopods, rugose corals, a few fragments of some colonial "brain" corals, and some crinoid fragments (no calyxes today, but they can be found). (And yes, even though I'm a metamorphic petrologist I can still fully appreciate the diversity and beauty of these fossil assemblages). The crest of the Bridger Range is capped by the Mississippian Madison Limestone, and many horizons are extremely rich in these fossil beds. I pointed out that on their next visit if they go just over the pass they will find a layer of columnar structures that are known as "bioherms" and these were deposited by layering of algal mats formed along the margin of a shallow, warm sea. I also directed their attention to the cliffs above us that have been tilted to a near-vertical orientation and folded in an intricate pattern. They thanked me for this information and we went on our way.
Reflecting farther up the trail, the most interesting part of this chance encounter was my conversation with the parents. More
About Us
Kim Kastens is a Doherty Senior Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory ( This site may be offline. ) of Columbia University. Her training and early career were in marine geology, but in recent years she has turned her professional efforts towards enhancing public understanding of the Earth and environment, by working with teachers, journalists, instructional technology and research on learning. Her current research focus is spatial thinking in geosciences.
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HideRead Kim's "By Way of Introduction" post.
Cathy Manduca, is the director of the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College and the Executive Director of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Her blog posts draw from her experiences working to improve teaching and learning at the undergraduate level, particularly in the geosciences, and from research on geoscience expertise and faculty learning.
Read Cathy's "By Way of Introduction" post.
What's this guy running to (or from?) Dave Mogk is a Professor of Geology at Montana State University. By training, he is a metamorphic petrologist with research interests in Precambrian evolution of continental crust, deep-seated petrogenetic processes, spectroscopic analysis of mineral surfaces, and recently, life in extreme environments. He has worked for the past 15 years to help build the geosciences education community, with particular interests in Earth system science, use of information technologies to support geoscience education, integration of research and education, and research on learning in the geosciences.
Read Dave's "How I got Here" posts: Part I, Part II, Part III
Why are feedback loops difficult to teach and learn?
In my last post, Tim Shipley and I wrote about the explanatory power of feedback loops, using examples from pandemics, climate change, escalation of hostilities, and explosions. In this post, I will share some thoughts about why feedback loop concepts can be so hard to teach and learn.
What do COVID-19, climate change, feuds and explosions have in common?
By March 14, 2020, there had been 47 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 across the U.S. Two days later: 68 deaths. Then 108, 150, 340, 590, 1050, 1707, 2509, 4079, 6053, 8501, 10989... The number of deaths doubled every few days. Such behavior feels alarming, out of control, inexplicable.
But, in fact, such exponential growth is characteristic of a class of phenomena well-known to science: a "reinforcing feedback loop." More
In which I experience the power of the right question
I am working on a project to research the kinds of questions that students ask when viewing geoscience data visualizations. Earth and Mind readers have seen a snippet of this work here. In justifying this work, we talk about how asking questions is an essential practice of science, how learning to ask questions is a necessary step towards becoming a curiosity-driven self-educator and life-long learner, and how seeking answers to self-generated questions is more powerfully engaging than seeking answers to questions provided by a book or teacher.
I really believe all this about the power of asking questions. I know all this, from both experience and theory. And yet earlier this year, I was astonished to observe the power that the right question had to compel and drive my own curiosity on a topic that had previously found distinctly un-interesting. More
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